PyProtocols

By Phillip J. EbySaturday, June 07, 2003

Do you hate having to write lots of if-then logic to test what type something is? Wouldn't it be nice if you could just declare "I want this object to have this behavior" and magically convert whatever value you have, to the type you need? PyProtocols lets you do just that, cleanly, quickly, and robustly -- even with built-in types or other people's classes.

PyProtocols extends the PEP 246adapt() function with a new "declaration API" that lets you easily define your own protocols and adapters, and declare what adapters should be used to adapt what types, objects, or protocols. In addition to its own Interface type, PyProtocols can also use Twisted and Zope's Interface types too. (Of course, since Twisted and Zope interfaces aren't as flexible, only a subset of the PyProtocols API works with them. Specific limitations are listed in the documentation.)

If you're familiar with Interface objects in Zope, Twisted, or PEAK, the Interface objects in PyProtocols are very similar. But, they can also do many things that no other Python interface types can do. For example, PyProtocols supports "subsetting" of interfaces, where you can declare that one interface is a subset of another existing interface. This is like declaring that somebody else's existing interface is actually a subclass of the new interface. Twisted and Zope don't allow this, which makes them very hard to use if you're trying to define interfaces like "Read-only Mapping" as a subset of "Mapping Object".

Also unlike Zope and Twisted, PyProtocols also doesn't force you to use a particular interface coding style or even a specific interface type. You can use its built-in interface types, or define your own. If there's another Python package out there with interface types that you'd like to use (CORBA? COM?), you can even create your own adapters to make them work with the PyProtocols API.

PyProtocols is also the only interface package that supports automatic "transitive adaptation". That is, if you define an adapter from interface A to interface B, and another from B to C, PyProtocols automatically creates and registers a new adapter from A to C for you. If you later declare an explicit adapter from A to C, it silently replaces the automatically created one.

PyProtocols may be used, modified, and distributed under the same terms and conditions as Python or Zope.